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SMART CITIES

CREDIT: PACESETTER HOMES (LEFT) AND M-AVI HOMES (RIGHT)

By a Whisper. Whisper Valley, a smart community under development in Austin, will feature homes by Pacesetter (left) and M-AVI (right).
Every time I visit India, I learn something about the United States. BUSINESSES CAN LEAD THE WAY
On one trip to India, there were floods in some areas of the country. In Silicon Valley, businesses are also involved. Facebook is planning
I returned to the U.S., where there was flooding in West Virginia, a new Menlo Park, Calif., smart village/campus for its employees and
Maryland, Louisiana and California. Water management, water local residents. Google is also working in downtown San Jose, Calif.,
quality, water availability—these are all important and basic issues to build a smart community.
with people living anywhere on Earth. In Austin, Texas, Taurus Development, Bosch, Rehau and others
During a meeting in December 2015, in the Indian state of Andhra have organized to create Whisper Valley, a 7,000-home new smart
Pradesh, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu noted that rather community currently under construction. In Canton, Ohio, Johnson
than working on smart cities in India, he needed us to work on smart Controls is engaged in creating the first-ever sports and entertainment
villages in Andhra Pradesh. “There are 1.3 billion people in India and “smart city.” In West London, Ontario, Canada, the West 5 project
70 percent of them live in villages. If they all move to the cities, it will is Ontario’s first sustainable, net-zero community planned urban
collapse my cities and collapse the villages,” he says. “We need smart development.
villages along with our smart cities, so that people have options to
stay in the villages if they want to and still get the benefits of new COLLABORATIVE EFFORTS
‘smart’ concepts being developed. We need ideas that increase their Cities are collaborating with universities, too. In 2015, the Mayor
quality of life, provide economic opportunities, and give them more of San Diego and U.C. San Diego Chancellor announced their
access to education.” participation as founding members of the MetroLab Network,
Chief Minister Naidu wants a series of dashboards in his state that with specific emphasis on infrastructure, city services and civic
can allow everyone to post and view what is going on in their village, engagement.
their district, the entire state, so the government and individuals can Paul Hawken has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability
all benefit from viewing the same information. I revisited India for the and changing the relationship between business and the environment.
fourth time in the last two years at the end of August 2017 and will in- He is currently on a book tour for his latest book, Drawdown. It is
clude even more information about this major project in our next article. a worthy read, because it is not alarmist, but instead assembles the
thoughts of more than 120 contributors to address a number of the
EDUCATION CAN LEAD THE WAY most important issues today—many of which give hope and real
There are many people engaged in smart communities globally. My solutions that the building industry can address directly.
involvement with India smart communities began with meeting In each of these venues, builders can play a key role in bringing
Prof. Solomon Darwin, at an IBM Watson conference. This is where smart communities into existence. The essential element is
I learned of his work with Henry Chesbrough, author of Open knowledge. People either know what to do, or they don’t. I see this
Innovation, at University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of in the classroom, in the field and in government. It is clear what
Business, and how Prof. Darwin was applying it in India. is needed—multidisciplinary collaboration and the “just in time”
Another example in academia is a Smart Communities course delivery of knowledge in government, business, education and
at Stanford University where Rich Lechner and Peter Williams technology related to the building industry. GB
have been teaching about smart communities and providing an
overview of the enablers, smarter systems and services, and risks and Terry Beaubois, a designer and architect, is founding director of the
challenges globally. I teach the Smart Villages module in this course Creative Research Lab at Montana State University, and was the
and am amazed at the amount of valuable information available MSU project director of the REHAU-MONTANA ecoSMART House
from projects that can help raise the awareness of what is currently Project. The project was awarded the Montana USGBC Honor Award
underway in smart communities globally. The students this year had Project of the Year in January 2016, as well as a Green Builder
®
a project evaluating a variety of cities globally, including Singapore; House of the Year Award. He is currently CEO of the internet startup
Songdo, Korea; Amsterdam; Columbus, Ohio; San Francisco,; BKS (Building Knowledge Systems LLC) and is an adjunct lecturer at
Nairobi; Barcelona; and Rio de Janeiro. Stanford University.

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